http://www.w3.org/ -- 5 June 2007 -- Today and tomorrow,
Web application experts are coming together in Dublin, Ireland, to see how
the use of declarative techniques that capture the application developer's
intentions, rather than the exact means for how to realize them, could reduce
the costs of developing and maintaining Web applications. The W3C's Workshop on Declarative Models of Distributed
Web Applications is focused on making more effective Web applications
available within a full range of environments - whether in the home, office
or mobile settings. It is hosted by MobileAware with the support of the Irish
State Development Agency, Enterprise Ireland.

"Developers spend a great deal of time and effort struggling with the
details of how different browsers vary in their support for markup,
stylesheets and scripting," explained Dave Raggett, W3C Activity Lead for the
Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity. "This will get
even more complicated with the increasing range of devices being used to
access the Web. This Workshop explores the opportunities for allowing
developers to focus on the application and end-user experience, leaving the
details for how this is to be realized to tools that deal with the
capabilities and shortcomings of each device."

Web applications currently involve a considerable amount of scripting both
in the Web page and Web server. Often, this also means reworking applications
for different devices and environments. This Workshop will look at the
potential for applying declarative techniques to describing Web applications,
as a whole rather than just the markup downloaded to each device.

Today, server-side scripts are used extensively to generate client-side
markup on the fly, and the cost of developing and maintaining these scripts
represents an opportunity for declarative based approaches. The emergence of
XML databases and XQuery looks promising. Likewise, the Semantic Web can be
applied to representing and reasoning over descriptions of device
capabilities and access control rules. Security and usability are key themes
for realizing the potential for new kinds of Web applications, particularly,
those involving richer access to device capabilities and to personal or
confidential information.

Important considerations for the Workshop are the challenges raised in
dealing with trust, identity, privacy and security. As applications require
interactions with multiple devices - such as remote printers or other
application servers, or ubiquitous applications that are run in response to
external events - there needs to be a way to provide secure access to those
devices without prompting multiple logins with each transaction.

W3C will make the Workshop program, position papers and presentations
publicly available from the Workshop page along
with a summary of discussions.